I ditched corporate America in 1994 and started a management consulting and venture capital firm (http://petercohan.com). I started following stocks in 1981 when I was in grad school at MIT and started analyzing tech stocks as a guest on CNBC in 1998. I became a Forbes contributor in April 2011. My 11th book is "Hungry Start-up Strategy: Creating New Ventures with Limited Resources and Unlimited Vision" (http://goo.gl/ygaUV). I also teach business strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.

myLINGO is a smartphone app that enables non-English speaking audiences to enjoy mainstream US movies by allowing them to hear the corresponding dub in their own language in real time via headphones connected to their smartphone or equivalent device.

On December 19, the Los Angeles-based company announced that it had raised angel capital totaling $750,000 from undisclosed angel investors. Moreover, myLINGO took on as advisors Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of United Talent Agency and Dennis Miller, President of Operations of Television Guide Networks and a former General Partner with Spark Capital and Barclay Knapp, former CEO of Britain’s largest cable company NTL, joining as chairman of the board.

Photo by Jung Kim

Olenka Polak — the soon-to-be Harvard College dropout — and her brother Adam co-founded myLINGO and in April 2013 it won Harvard College’s Innovation Challenge. It all started with a family dilemma — their Polish-born parents — who immigrated to the US — were unable to enjoy their trip to the cinema.

Why not? According to my December 18 interview with Olenka, “I went to a movie with my mom and dad and they couldn’t understand a thing. I wondered if there was a way for language-displaced individuals (LDIs) like my parents to go to a movie and enjoy watching it.”

Then she discovered that movie studios create tracks in different languages — the problem is that they are not particularly easy to use. Said Olenka, “We started the company my sophomore year at Harvard. We developed myLINGO so that other families won’t have the same experience. We want to make it possible for anyone to watch a film or TV show in the language that they are most comfortable using.”

myLINGO uses audio recognition technology — signal processing and audio fingerprinting — to play dubbed language audio tracks “in perfect synch with the action on screen and thus allows users to enjoy the film in their own language in real time via headphones connected to their smartphone or equivalent device,” explained Olenka.

Dan Ellis, a Columbia University professor and signal processing expert has advised myLINGO. Not surprisingly, he is a fan of its technology noting that it’s ”a great solution to a big problem studios and theaters face as they try to include everyone in the moviegoing experience. I’m thrilled to be a sounding board for two very talented and ambitious young entrepreneurs.”

Olenka had a difficult conversation with her parents when she announced her intention to drop out of Harvard and move to Los Angeles in January 2014. As she said, “I couldn’t participate in meetings for the company in Los Angeles and be a student at the same time. Why did I walk away from Harvard? The LDI market is 100 million people worldwide.”

When she moves to Los Angeles, she hopes not to be disillusioned. She said, “We have amazing advisors and we are talking to the Big Six studios. They are all enthusiastic because they have international marketing budgets to promote their movies. For example, US expats will go to a movie in China, but when they get to the theatre, it is in Chinese and they can’t understand it. We will let the studios send a better message: ‘Come see my movie. Now you can understand it.’”

Olenka thinks the product is pleasing to customers. “People who use the product give it a Net Promoter Score of 10 — meaning that they would definitely recommend it to a friend. If those customers are anything like my Polish family, demand for our product will grow fast,” she explained.

And myLINGO’s business model depends on paying consumers. “We will charge consumers for the product when they buy their ticket. They will rent the audio track to watch the movie, then it will be deleted.”

But myLINGO won’t be able to get access to that audio track unless it can assure the studios that the benefits they will get through higher ticket sales will not be offset by people pirating those audio tracks.

It remains to be seen whether Olenka will end up more like two of Harvard’s most famous dropouts — Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — or what I would guess is a much longer list of Harvard dropouts whom the media do not celebrate.

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